Single in Singapore

Regarding the title of this post, “Single in Singapore:” Admittedly, “single” is superfluous for regular readers and for anyone who knows me in real life, two groups that pretty much form a single circle on a Venn diagram. An introverted, insecure, neurotic, relatively reclusive person tends to be single pretty much everywhere he goes. Today, it’s Singapore for me.

Superfluous though “single” may be, as those regular readers know, I’m always alert to available alliterative prose possibilities. So how could I not go with that headline? Heck, it repeats not just the first vowel or consonant sound (consonant in this case) in two of its three words, but rather the whole first syllable in “single” and “Singapore.” Whenever such alliteration opportunities arise, you should certainly seize the superb circumstances that sing their scintillating syntax so supremely. But enough about that.

Another thing regular readers know is that I often get distracted by irrelevant nonsense, such as adoration of alliteration. Let’s move on, shall we?

With this visit, a new continent index page, Asia, will appear in the menu of this travel journal. This is not my first time in Asia. I visited Japan in 2018, but that was the last trip I took before starting this blather. So, here we are. A new continent as far as these pages are concerned.

Toronto to Singapore

If getting there is half the fun, this trip is going to be something of a bust. In this case, fun doesn’t apply to the getting-there part.

The journey started with a more than five-hour flight from Toronto to Vancouver, an almost six-hour connection in Vancouver, followed by a sixteen-hour flight from Vancouver to Singapore. That’s about 27 hours. And that doesn’t include the time getting to and from airports and arriving two hours ahead of my flight out of Toronto.

There are frequent flights from Toronto to Vancouver. So I could have opted for a shorter connection in Vancouver. But there’s only one nonstop from Vancouver to Singapore each day, so being neurotic, I worried about missing it and wanted the extra time in case there was a problem with my first flight.

As it turns out, both flights were on time. Or rather, the Vancouver to Singapore flight was scheduled to last 16 hours and 40 minutes, but it arrived early. So, better than on time.

I managed to sleep for at least six hours on the flight to Singapore, and I think I might have dozed for a half hour or so on the Vancouver flight. So, surprisingly, I wasn’t particularly tired when I finally, at long last, landed in Singapore.

[Spoiler alert: Because I didn’t post this until early evening here in Singapore. Me from a few hours in the future travelled back in time to this post about my first morning in Singapore and let morning-me know that jet lag hit me with a brutal thud later this afternoon.

Wandering Around Singapore

I arrived at my hotel at about 8:30 in the morning. Unsurprisingly, my room wasn’t ready yet, but they said I could probably get it by 10:00, so I went for a bit of a walk—or a bit of a steambath, depending on your perspective. That is to say, it’s hot here. But it’s humid heat, so it’s particularly oppressive.

I was wearing some jeans and a lightweight long-sleeved shirt. I had shorts and short-sleeved shirts in my luggage. But when I went out, that luggage was checked with the front desk, and I didn’t have a room to change in. I walked for about an hour, returned to my hotel, and sat in the air-conditioned lobby until my room was ready. Then, I showered, changed into lighter clothes, and headed out again.

During that first walk, I saw from a distance a building I’ve seen in pictures I don’t know how many times: the Marina Bay Sands. It consists of three buildings with what has the appearance of a giant, but squat-to-scale canoe that straddles the top of the three. (For most people, it probably conjures up a different sort of boat, but I’m Canadian. It looked like a canoe to me. A weird canoe, true, but a canoe nonetheless.)

I don’t know if the Marina Bay Sands is all hotel, but that’s its primary function.

Close to where I got that view of the Marina Bay Sands is Merlion Park, which is beside Marina Bay. Back in the 1980s, someone in the Singapore tourist office thought it would be cool for Singapore to have a myth attached to it, so they created one about a half-fish, half-lion creature. They commissioned a concrete sculpture of the creature, and it sits in Merlion Park. It’s not a particularly beautiful or artistically significant sculpture, but tourists flock to it. Hey, I’m a tourist. I took a look.

The architecture I saw on my brief wander was mostly relatively modern. And the Marina Bay Sands isn’t the only striking modern architecture in Singapore. There’s a lot of it.

Marina Bay Sands Observation Deck

After showering off the morning’s sweat, not to mention the past day and a half’s worth of whatever normally accumulates on my body from just living, and donning more weather-appropriate attire, I headed out into Singapore again.

This time, I didn’t just look at Marina Bay Sands from a distance. I went there. There’s a publicly accessible viewing deck on that squat canoe-like building topper. For just the price of customers’ firstborn, the building owners let the general public up there to take in the panorama. Because I don’t have any children, they settled for merely an obscene amount of money. It was a long and tough negotiation, but they accepted a large credit card payment from me in the end.

The public observation deck doesn’t include the full top of the structure spanning the three buildings. It forms a narrow horseshoe around one end of that top level. The arms of the horseshoe extend maybe halfway along the building’s length. The views of Singapore and the sea from there are spectacular, just not worth the price of admission in my opinion.

One thing that impressed me, if “impressed” is the right word here, is the number of cargo ships of various types I could see anchored out at sea, just sitting there in neat rows. What are they all doing there? I didn’t try to count, but there were probably at least 100. Haven’t they got anything better to do? (I also saw them from the plane as it approached Singapore.)

The area between the horseshoe arms of the observation deck, as well as the rest of the top deck of the Marina Bay Sands, is accessible only to hotel guests. The space includes a famous infinity pool and, I think, a restaurant and maybe a bar or two. I’m not a hotel guest, so I’m not sure.

Gardens by the Bay

Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay is a large botanical garden built on reclaimed land, with some particularly stunning features. Most of the gardens are free to wander around, and I did some of that this morning, but there are also four paid attractions within the gardens—the OCBC Skyway, the Supertree Observatory, the Cloud Forest, and the Flower Dome. I visited a couple of those this morning and a couple this afternoon.

You can buy single tickets for each of those attractions, or there are some combo tickets. But I found the combo tickets confusing. I didn’t see a combo ticket that included all four attractions. I could buy a combo ticket that got me into either the OCBC Skyway or the Cloud Forest and the Supertree Observatory.

There was also a combination ticket for the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest, but that combo was not available at the ticket booth near the OCBC Skyway and Supertree Observatory (which are both in the same section of the gardens and where I went first). As far as I could see, it was available only at the ticket booth by the Cloud Forest and the Flower Dome, which are side-by-side. I have a feeling the tickets I ended up buying weren’t the cheapest way to see all of the attractions.

The free portions of the gardens are very lush with lots of trees and some flowers. There are also some water features, including one or two lily ponds. In one, which had a large swan statue sitting in it, I’m not sure the aquatic plants were indeed lilies. They didn’t quite look like any lilies I’d ever seen, and they weren’t in bloom.

The lilies in the other (or maybe only) lily pod weren’t in bloom either, but the lily pads were of the type I recognized from seeing them in only a couple of other botanical gardens. They were near-perfect green circles. I think they’re called Victoria Lilies, but don’t quote me on that. I could be wrong.

The paid attractions I visited in the morning, OCBC Skyway and the Supertree Observatory, are both in the Supertrees section of the park.

The supertrees in question are not trees. They are tall concrete and metal structures shaped like stylized trees. The design provides a skeleton for the myriad living plants that grow in niches on the trunks of the supertrees.

If you’ve ever only seen two pictures of Singapore, one is probably of the Marina Bay Sands and the other is likely of some of the Supertrees lit up at night or twilight at the Gardens by the Bay. (I didn’t see them lit up today. I wasn’t there late enough.)

The OCBC Skyway is a walkway attached to three of the supertrees and suspended high above the ground between them. The price of admission allows you to walk along the walkway and take in the views of the Gardens by the Bay below and some of Singapore beyond, including a good view of the Marina Bay Sands.

An elevator in one of the Supertrees takes customers up to the entrance end of the Skyway. Another elevator takes them down through the Supertree at the other end.

There was no sway whatsoever in the Skyway. It felt stable and sturdy enough, and the railings were sufficiently substantial that my acrophobia did not kick in at all. So, yay for that.

The Supertree Observatory consists of two observation deck levels, one on top of the other, at the top of one of the supertrees. The lower level offers an indoor area with air-conditioned comfort and an outdoor ring around the outer circumference of the indoor area. The upper level is all outdoors and, therefore, subject to the tropical climate.

The Supertree Conservatory provides much the same views as the OCBC Skyway. The Conservatory is not on one of the Supertrees that the Skyway attaches to. It has its own elevator. So there’s no way to get from one attraction to the other, so if you want to see them both, there’s no choice but to pay for them both.

After visiting the Supertree Conservatory, I had lunch at a mostly Asian food court in the gardens. As is my habit in this journal, that’s my cue to end this post. I’ll publish another entry briefly describing my afternoon activities. Why “briefly?” See the note above about the jet lag that hit me hard this afternoon. That’ll give you a clue.